Handlebar Height // How low is too low?

everyone John four-bike good advisor so many times when I do a bike fit one of the questions or one of the goals that comes up from the rider is that they want to be they want to get their bar position as low as possible they want to be more aggressive and ostensibly more aerodynamic now whether having a lower bar position is always aerodynamic is kind of another video that we can address at another time what I want to go over today is how do we determine what that optimal bar height is essentially how low is too low for you now wanting to get lower with your bar position is fine but we need to understand that there are trade-offs especially as we near sort of our end range for it and there are a lot of factors that go into how low you can get you bar there's your morphology like how long your torso is how long your arms are etc it's also dependent on your mobility your flexibility you know and also your strength and a number of other factors now trying to teach in this type of setting how to assess flexibility and strength and also take into account somebody's physical characteristics is fairly complicated and especially as you start throwing in more variables it just gets unwieldy but I think we can approach this from a different standpoint and make it simpler we're going to talk about some symptoms that can come up when we have too low of a bar position and we can kind of work backwards from there now just know that I'm gonna be approaching this from the standpoint of the rider who has kind of already looked at their cleat position in their saddle position and even if things aren't completely perfect they're they've they've figured a few things out and we're just kind of isolating the bar position we kind of have to otherwise again we get too many variables involved and we're also kind of taking it from a standpoint of somebody that's riding that is reasonably comfortable doesn't really have symptoms necessarily and they're wondering if they can go lower now if you already have symptoms and you're wondering if your bar height is creating them you can you can do use all this same information but you're going to be doing things in a little different way so instead of progressively lowering the bar and just keeping an eye out for these symptoms the person that is already having some problem on the bike you can actually do the opposite you can actually change your bar height raise it slightly in a progressive way again a little bit at a time and see if these symptoms that you were experiencing change in any way do they get better or worse do they go away completely but all the same information should apply here so in my experience bike fitting there are two main limiters that people have and they are the proper pelvic or optimal pelvic angle and the second one is our readily available amount of hip flexion so every one of us has sort of a narrow range of pelvic angle where the pelvis is actually going to be stable powerful and will also be comfortable okay and if we go outside of this range if we push it too far we'll generally people have symptoms that we're going to talk about in a second now why does how does bar positioning relate to the pelvic angle well if our bar position is let's say too low it can it will often pull the pelvis out of posture and either cause it to tip forward more than it wants to or more than it's steep but if it doesn't cause the pelvis to tip forward what it can also do is cause the pelvis to slide forward and if we slide forward now we're sitting our sit bones are not resting on the proper part of the saddle and we're sitting on sort of the narrower section in the middle of the saddle and this can create perineal pressure or soft tissue irritation so there we go there's our first start as what are these symptoms that you've pushed it too far for your pelvic angle well pernil pressure is one of them for the two reasons I just mentioned either the set of the pelvis having a tip forward too much or the pelvis sliding forward into the wrong place on the saddle another symptom is low back discomfort especially when the pelvis does not tip excessively it's avoiding that let's say it can actually force a little bit of put a little leverage on the lower spine and this can create some back symptoms and then the third most common symptom the third thing we see with this is when somebody has hand pressure hand numbness because when that pelvis is tipped forward too much or it's slide forward out of out of position it makes it difficult for us to bear proper amounts of weight through the pelvis and also actually through our feet as well and when we're not burying the proper weight at those two points it's going to put more pressure on our hand position and this can again lead to and pressure and numbness it can even lead to shoulder discomfort neck discomfort because we're just bearing more weight through the upper body okay now let's look at our second limiter which is hip flexion so what is hip flexion hip flexor is essentially just the amount that we are raising our thigh up essentially through the pedal stroke and it doesn't matter it can be in any posture essentially the closer we get our torso and our thigh okay that's closing the hip you could say is hip flexion now most of us have plenty of Grose hip flexion range of motion to satisfy the pedal stroke cycling does require a certain amount and certainly the more aggressively we position our torso it'll require us generally to have a more hip flexion but even then most of us have enough to accommodate even that the problem comes in it is is it relates to the speed at which were required to pedal when you take a any activity that requires us to generate force and you throw a speed component onto it and pedaling that 85 to 90 rpm is still pretty fast it will require you to work through a narrower portion of your range of motion in order for you to remain efficient in in generating power etc put more simply our muscles our joints we are generally more efficient when we are working closer to the middle of our range the further we move from the middle of that range the more difficult that's going to be so again while most of us have enough hip flexion it can be difficult to take advantage of all this motion while we're pedaling at our normal Cadence's our normal Cadence's require us to shorten the range up a little bit and so what happens when we get that bar too low well when our movie may be into a couple of degrees too much hip flexion where the body tries to avoid it essentially now generally it willit ride it more at one side than the other because most of us have one side that is actually better at it and better moving into that motion than the other and the way we avoid it what happens is the most common thing we see is when somebody hikes their hip up and so you see a lot more hip vertical motion in through somebody's pedal stroke in this case additionally it can also cause some uneven sort of muscle activation through the gluts and the lower extremity muscles and it can cause us to also sit off the side of the saddle or skewed with one hip further forward again in trying to avoid moving too far into the range for one hip so these are these are the we've pushed it too far symptoms that I was talking about for hip flexion the first being vertical hip motion the hips moving up and down too much either on one side or both side now this is something that does work it is easier when you have a partner that can you know that is watch peddle and often I hear from spouses or riding partners that say oh this individual yeah I know I always notice that their that their hip is moving this way or throwing up where they're sitting off the side of the saddle or they're sitting you know one hip further forward they're just not straight on the side and so it does help to have somebody there to to kind of take a look at you you can also take a look at this just by shooting some video of yourself on a stationary trainer but all of these things are again symptoms of you know potentially that the bar position is too low in many circumstances when I had people with and this is the problem and they are skewed and they are they are shifted off to one side or they do have one hip moving up vertically too much or all the above when we get their bar positions set properly when it is the main problem there their symmetry on the saddle immediately begins to improve now what other symptoms might you might you experience well a really common one is one-sided sit bone discomfort on the saddle and this again goes back to how we're sitting because we're seeing skewed and we're at exerting uneven pressure on the saddle and then finally the what the last most common thing is back pain and many people mistake it for Oh must be flexing the spine too much and it's not just spinal flex not just lumbar flexion we again like hip flexion most of us have enough trunk flexion in order to make it through a standard pedal stroke it's just that the speed and the reciprocal nature of the pet of pedaling can introduce a little bit of rotation and so you take that little bit of leverage that's happening at the lumbar spine and then you add some rotation to it and that's what can create the problem is that torsion can create extra stress okay so if you are testing whether you can go lower and you've lowered your bar by changing the stem up maybe a couple of degrees or removing a spacer from underneath the stem because you want to take it slow and you do that and you start to get some symptoms whether it's perineal pressure whether it's low back pain it's more hand pressure or that you get you you notice that one sit bone is getting more irritated as you ride or you know riding partners or visually you can see that you're not sitting as square as you were before then you know that okay that changed that that was too much and again if you or someone that already has some of these symptoms and you're wondering if the bar height is the culprit raising the bar position and going through and testing and seeing how these symptoms do they resolve any so that's the other way that you can use this now keep in mind this is not perfect this is not comprehensive it's really not feasible to provide a comprehensive list of everything that can tell you that your bar height is is misplaced these are just the most common ones so I'm gonna shoot an addendum to this video and what it is going to be is it's going to focus mostly on the hip flexion issue that we just talked about and it's really three simple kind of tests or kind of quick assessments that you can do on yourself and see if perhaps hip flexion might be part of the problem again it's not a perfect or comprehensive test by no means is meant to diagnose anything it's merely just to give you a sense of to some degree your symmetry and whether you have some maybe some limitation there that needs to be either addressed or accommodated for on the bite so that's all for this one thanks everyone for hanging in there go check out that second video and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Bike Fit Adviser

Views: 314,318

Keywords: bike fit, handlebar height, road bike, road bike bar height, bicycle handlebar, bicycle handlebar height, cycling, triathlon, bicycle, bike fitting

Id: _SYw-uLDNtw

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018